Jordan Westhoff's Blog

Tag Archives: Arri

Over the weekend I spent a good deal of time looking at just how intensive a full RAW data workflow can be. I also wanted to compare the burden of 4K RAW vs Arri’s 2.8K RAW via a S.Two recording device and see which required the most data overhead to work with. This allows us to simply look at how much drive space is required and discount the physical CPU usage of the project since pretty much all of my machines were running at almost full bore whenever renders were required.

While storage is not really a problem for a lot of industry professionals, it can be quite the burden for independents or students. Not every student has several terabytes (a terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes) of unused, high speed storage. A lot of people wonder if they van get away with slower, basic desktop drives for data of this proportion but it really comes down to how long you want to wait. Slow drives serve information, well, slowly. Waiting for 300GB of renders to load can take ages and when deadlines are at stake, it really isn’t viable.

Below, I’ve compiled a good deal of raw statistics from our recent shootout project. Since I was in charge of managing the data, image processing and running the servers we worked off of, I have the entirety of the raw footage as well as a significant portion of the renders. This accounts for tons and tons of space, enough space in fact that I thought comprehensive statistics might be helpful to visualize where all of that information is going.

There are a couple foreword things to note though, before we get started. In some of the statistics, I pitted the total usage by camera which encompasses all of the information used, start to finish on each camera platform. In one or two other statistics, I broke up the information to reflect intermediate stages. For the Arri D-21, this required converting raw S.Two DPX files to .ARI files and then exporting them again from ARRI RAW Converter to DPX or .TIFF file sequences to color grade and then make a final export of. For the Sony there was simply taking the camera files from the onboard SD card and then grading and re-exporting. In 4K, however, there was significantly more to do. Dumping the card gave a nice, proprietary, MXF wrapper with all of the files which had to be opened with Sony RAW Viewer in order to convert them to 16-bit DPX files. These could then be graded and exported again to a DPX or TIFF sequence to be imported for analysis and editing. Each of these reflect storage as you can imagine, and it presents quite a trend in the statistics.

This accounts for all of the ‘mission critical’ information stored for the shootout.

Here, we can see just how much data there was overall. In total, the final aggregate size of all resources exceeded 1.6TB! This included all footage, start to finish, ARRI, Sony and Sony 4K as well as renders, CC passes, graphics for our final video and any other data in between. Keep in mind that for the actual camera footage (which comprised a significant portion of the overall data used, but more on that later) totaled only about 10 minutes per camera (and less for the Sony 4K). This is because most of the shots used in the shootout were of charts or color scenes – the longest scenes were barely over 50 seconds apiece. Therefore, shooting an entire film on any of these platforms would consume an incredible amount of data. Broke up above are four different categories and each are perhaps a bit vague so I’ll take a moment to explain them.

The first, and the largest is the Footage Archive. This is an aggregate gathering of just the base footage captured from each camera. This also incorporates some intermediate files in the case of the ARI – essentially all of the footage classified here was footage that was ready to go into editing minus any major color correction. The Shootout Archive contains all of the intermediates of the pick scenes and the color corrected scenes. This means that any footage that was observed and chosen to be good enough for analysis went on to continue the chain of picture processing. The files contained in this directory are renders from the S.Two and then processed in ARRI’s ARC as well as the Sony HD and 4K clips that were chosen – those also underwent their respective processing steps as well. Shootout MAIN is the working directory for all of the analysis, as well as the video production portion of the project. Here are all of the final renders, color correction finals, stock footage, B-roll, preliminary video screening renders and narration as well as all of the graphics that our team generated as well. Finally, there is a Web Access Point directory. This was a separate directory created on a network server in order to provide each member of the team with fast, reliable intermediary storage for their own assets in production. These could be screen captures, editing files, project files, you name it. This is the working miscellaneous that helped make the workflow so efficient – each member had a fast directory to work from and then contribute to the final project being assembled in real time.

Each day of shooting generated different amounts of storage requirement based on scene.

Since the shootout was spread over three (technically four, when you look at 4K) days, it was useful to look at how usage varied by day. Some of the graph information was cut off but the four largest portions were indicative of the longest shots. Day 1 files came close to taking the lead in storage but our Day 3 files took the lead with 19.6% of total data usage – these stats merely incorporate the files coming from the ARRI and the Sony in HD video mode. The third largest, at 17% was from our fourth day of shooting and this comprises all of the Sony 4K raw shoot files. Each of the much smaller portions is broken up by shot – some scenes took many shots and some took far less.

This shows a better look of how production workflow can impact your data needs for each project.

Here, this is a final, final look at how much information from each step of production comprises the total. This specific figure ties directly into the final, cleaned up and organized storage stats of the shootout in its entirety. Of the approximate 1.6TB required, the most costly stage of production was generating all of the intermediate files. This was especially true of the 4K tests which equaled almost half of this information despite shooting for only about %20 as long as the ARRI and Sony HD tests. Both RAW tests required multiple intermediate steps which chewed through tons of space because of each’s respective resolution. We chose to work with DPX and TIFF’s since those are lossless formats and overall exhibited the best quality.

All in all, shooting RAW is a very exhausting process, both from a processing and storage perspective. Your storage needs will be dependent on the camera and the codec/format you choose to edit in but it’s always safe to budget one to two terabytes for shooting a short and always, always remember to BACKUP your information! All of the statistics here leave out the backups that were set in place to safeguard our information. At any one point, our information was backed up in two additional places – one in a hardware RAID attached to a workstation on another end of campus and a full minute-to-minute backup stored on a NAS. This NAS also pulled all of the web assets from each member in order to keep their assets online and safe at the same time. Feel free to contact me if you have questions as well!

In the future I’ll be making a post dedicated to the labyrinth of storage and why different types are better than others, as well as a look into what I’m using to manage all of this information! Thanks for reading!

Recently, as part of the MPS Shootout we just finished, my shootout team and I had a great opportunity to shoot with some interesting Sony hardware since our main objective was to shoot and compare the RAW cinema capabilities of the Arri D-21 and the Sony NEX-FS700.

Natively, the Sony FS700 can’t shoot 4K. However, with a gracious software update from SONY that was implemented and installed by the RIT SoFA cage, the feature is unlocked. While the sensor and the camera on board hardware can handle the capture of 4K, the camera itself has no reliable method to record it. Without any hardware upgrade, the Sony FS700 only employs an SD card slot, which is not fast enough, nor high enough capacity to begin to think about recording 4K content. Hence, enter the Sony AXS-R5 + HXR-IFR5 4K bundle. The school didn’t have these units available, but with a grant we were able to rent the equipment for a night in order to conduct our tests.

The most expensive hard drive toaster you ever will buy (for now until…8K?)

It was actually a pretty difficult feat getting our paws on this particular setup. The physical recording unit, the AXS-R5 is built and engineered for Sony’s PMW-F5 and Cine-Alta F55 cameras – not natively meant for the NEX-FS line. SONY solved this problem by engineering an “interface” unit – the HXR-IFR5. This unit takes in the 4K signal over an SDI cable and then pushes the signal to the recorder to be saved. Overall, the two units together cost just over $10,500 and that doesn’t include mounting, storage or other accessories. For our test, we used a single 512gb SSD, also manufactured by SONY, and it really did the trick! As a result of the difficulty in acquiring the devices, we couldn’t shoot for all of our test days but a small rental company out of Tennessee, pulled through for us! Enter LensRentals.com! With the unit acquired, I could then proceed to unbox it and start recording!

Initial Vanguard package containing our SONY gear.

All of our SONY gear nestled inside of its shipping case.

All unboxed and joined together – just need a camera!

After the unit was unboxed, we were able to test it our in an actual scene! We proceeded to setup SOFA’s Studio B for our tests which gave us plenty of space to work, as well as plenty of lights, tables, and surfaces to set up our gear and mount our wall test targets. We shot a variety of scenes, mostly charts, but also we got a couple more shots featuring aesthetic objects as well for style.

Studio B setup for 4K RAW

This was our go-to setup. The camera (SONY FS700) was linked to the onboard SD media and the 4K unit via SDI which was also being monitored via the onboard signal feed. Since our 4K and HD were the same aspect ratio, the framing did not change, which meant we could safely use the Panasonic HD monitor to see what the camera was seeing from the DIT station. On set we had an Apple MacBook Pro to monitor files once they were recorded and ingested. All in all, the setup was far less complicated than some other setups, like the ARRI D-21 setup which was a spaghetti nightmare.

S.Two recording setup for the Arri D-21

Mostly, all of our testing went well. We were able to gather all of the shots we wanted and several others. One snag did occur though, and I think that it is best described by the beautifully composed SnapChat that one of my partners, Carly Cerquone, sent to detail the issue.

Yup, that’s right. We made the ol’ rookie mistake.

In the end though, the project was a ton of fun and myself and the entire team learned a whole lot about the process of shooting and working with 4K. It is significantly different (and far more time consuming) than any other workflow currently around and you can find all of our findings and video information at the Shootout page on my blog here as well. Thanks for reading! As one final note, we decided to engineer our own dolly for pure creativity’s sake to capture the opening scene of the MPS SHOOTOUT Video – here was our super innovative approach. Below are some other photos from on set as well.

So, over the last couple of evenings I’ve spent a good deal of time updating the site! I”ve added new content, a couple new pages, and most importantly of all, began posting content from Spring semester! There’s a lot going on here so let me break down all of the updates for you!

So this is the first big one! If you head over to my page under projects, you’ll see the page for the MPS Shootout! This is a whopper and all of the content from the shoots, uncluding b-roll, final analysis and our final video screened for all of RIT’s film school is posted. There’s a lot of information here, and if you’ve followed along at all, it should be pretty exciting. I found it easier to turn it into a whole page, rather than a post so it can house more information as well as be easier to find later as more posts pile up!

The page is finally live! I have some updates to publish tomorrow so stay tuned for those! If you follow the header, it will take you to the landing page for my senior thesis project – this sucker is being researched over the summer and then the completion of research and the beginning stages of engineering will start in the fall! I’m still working on populating the page with information about the initial ideals and concepts of the project but those will be up soon as well!

GitHub!

As a lot of you know, I’ve recently moved over to doing all of my code versioning and revision tracking via GitHub and I think it’s pretty cool! I’ve started a couple of pages within this site to either pull from Gists that I’m working on or completed that I want to show you or from actual Git hub repos. Basic Gists can be found here and the rest of my stuff can be found on my actual GitHub page for now!

Thanks for catching up, be sure to check back to the pages as I’m adding more posts!

Well, the semester is finally over which means like the academic semester, my junior year at RIT is complete! It was certainly a busy one! I have a lot of really cool summer plans, which I’ll post here but I wanted to recap the year a little bit and I’ll be spending the next week or two uploading a lot of thework myself and my teammates accomplished over the semester.

For the summer, I’ll be returning to RIT to work as a member of our research computing department. Originally, I had investigated traveling to LA after receiving job offers from SONY and IMAX but after some thinking I decided to stick around ROC and take an innovative position with RIT RC since it catered a bit more to my interests and offered some really valuable opportunities to learn about open source and parallel computing. There I will be maintaining and working to make research advances on 4K video streaming over IP as well as a variety of other tasks that tie into parallel computing, open source computing, global teleconferencing and open source global video delivery to large tiled displays!

Also, this semester we finished the third year MPS shootout – a deeply analytical camera comparison test designed to pit two cinema grade systems against each other in order to determine which system is better for upperclassmen RIT School of Film and Animation students to produce films on based on a variety of factors. My role for the project was primarily to oversee DIT and technician work as well as programming and analysis. In the next week or so, our final public video will be posted with our results in a video delivery format for easy synopsis of our project. Our team was responsible for the most sophisticated video systems, the Sony FS700 and the Arri Arriflex D-21 and tasked with comparing their RAW workflows.

Over the course of the semester this was a very common way to find me – peering over the lid of my laptop at any given time.

Additionally, my senior thesis project was approved which means research for that will begin and continue throughout the summer, I’ll be posting a lot of updates here (Senior Project Page) with some translations to English as well (not just engineering speak!). As I reach checkpoints and make progress, I’ll make it a point to update this page so any interested parties can follow along!

As always, thanks for reading and look for more content in the coming days – I’m home now and I’ve begun to catch up on some much needed sleep so work should be updated soon!

As I’m sure you all know, it’s spring break time in America! However, now that RIT is on the semester system, this is no longer the eat and sleep break that I’ve grown accustomed to, but another opportunity to catch up on mountains of homework!

A good friend of mine, Carly P. Cerquone, DP’ing the Sony FS700 for high frame rate shooting.

That being said, I’m actually embroiled in some pretty cool projects at the moment! Of these, most are Motion Picture Science related – we are in the middle of our third-year shoot out, initial thesis proposals and a host of other projects and labs. I promise to post lots more updates as we continue through; we’ve only just wrapped up our first day of shooting! As with all of my other projects, I will post them when they are completed as well! I’m progressing through a lot of new code, 4K RAW cinema, some thesis builds in the computer department and others, so look for updates over the next couple of days!